Aldo Hoeben's blog

I just noticed that I missed the sites inception anniversary by a week. I started working on this incarnation of the IVRPA site *just* over 5 years ago...

After about four and a quarter years of spending a sizeable chunk for my spare (and not so spare) time as a hobby, it is time for a break. I started working on the IVRPA website as a hobby, and over the past year and a half most of the fun of doing it eroded away. A recent chain of events has convinced me it is better to step down as (sole) webmaster now than to stay and become (even more) bitter. Just thought you should know...

Thanks for all the fish.
Aldo

As I mentioned in my previous post, there's an extensive todo list for the ivrpa site ecosystem. Listed below is

remaining issues since Drupal 5 migration

• notifications: reformat notification messages (remove "greetings [user],")
• Googlemaps are not showing in gallery posts.
• Search results when searching profiles don't look right.
• Fix googlemap "overlay" (balloon) content on Find a Member page.
• Move google map in user/me/edit to seperate page (user/me/edit/location).

This december, it will have been 5 years since I created the first user for this site. Since then, there's always been a notion of a webteam. Though the webteam has from time to time been contributing to parts of the contents of the site, I don't think I am being unfair to any of the current and past webteam members if I say that I have been the sole contributor to the actual working of the site.

CuTy, the Flash 10 based VR viewer that displays the QTVR files on the IVRPA websites, is now officially available as an open source project:
http://opensource.ivrpa.org/cuty

I've been setting up an infrastructure for hosting vr-related open source projects on the IVRPA site for a while, and CuTy is the trial project for that. More to come...

As I mentioned in my previous post, the site was bottlenecked by having the Apache/PHP and MySQL servers on two separate machines. This is the standard setup at Dreamhost; even if you have a PS, the mysql part is hosted on a different server. So even if you don't have to share a machine with other websites hosted on Dreamhost, you're still sharing their network latency when the Apache/PHP server is communicating with the MySQL server. On a typical non-cached page, the IVRPA site makes 200-400 queries to the database.

Since the migration, the site has been having performance issues. While I had hoped that the site perfromed better with a newer version of Drupal, we're actually seeing worse performance.

The IVRPA website is undergoing major maintenance work. We are updating our data structures in the process. Read the announcement for more information.

During the migration, the site is in a "read-only" state; you can not log in to the site to post content and/or make changes to your profile etc. The IVRPA mailinglist remain active. In this post, I will keep track of the progress of the actual migration.

Mon, 9:06AM

I'm generally quite happy with the site here at Dreamhost. Even so, every now and then, the site(s) become(s) unresponsive and goes down. We're being told that our site was using up a lot of memory, which crashed the (private) server. After a reboot, most of the time the site works fine again.

It's been a bit silent, but that does not mean nothing has been going on ;-)

Yesterday, Matthias announced the website for panoramas and still images shot at the IAPP/IVRPA Alburquerque Balloon Fiesta. In the next few days, that site should be filling up with some nice panoramas shot by the IVRPA members attending the fiesta. It looks like a great event for VR panoramas.